A ringfort, or rath, once defined this slight rise in the grassland, its circular earthen bank marking out a farmstead that would have been home to an early medieval family, probably sometime between the fifth and twelfth centuries. Today, the enclosure survives only in fragments, and for much of its circuit there is simply nothing to see at all.

The rath at Ballynabanaba measures around 29 metres in diameter, which places it at the smaller end of the ringfort scale. A tree-lined bank still traces part of the circuit, giving the site its most legible feature, but from the north-west around through north to the north-east the bank has degraded entirely, leaving no surface trace. On the eastern side, a later field wall has been built directly over the original bank, the kind of quiet overwriting that happened across Ireland as post-medieval farming reorganised the landscape without much concern for what lay beneath. Ringforts are among the most common archaeological monument types in Ireland, with tens of thousands once dotting the countryside, yet even common things can disappear. This one is further along that process than most.

The site sits on a gentle rise, and in clear conditions the low swell of the ground is just about perceptible against the surrounding grassland. Visitors who know what a rath is supposed to look like may find it instructive precisely because so little survives. The tree line marks the arc of the old bank on the visible stretches, and tracing where it stops, and where the field wall begins, gives a reasonable sense of how successive generations have worked around and eventually over a monument that was already ancient when those walls were built.